I've heard the term consenting adults too many times put forward as a term in arguments supposedly based upon a priori logic. Rarely, if ever, is any attempt to define the term adult made. Instead, a magical definition of being of eighteen years of age is used.
Let me be clear. In any objective morality, a 7 year old who looks, acts and thinks exactly like an average 18 year old should be treated exactly like an average 18 year old. That is the very meaning of objectivity. If you wish to say that someone should be treated differently, you must give a reason why his looks, actions or thoughts should cause that person to be treated differently.
An objective society is, normally, a fair society. IE- in general, objective morality judges people based on their actions, not on looks or even methodology of thought. Only the result of their thought process matters. IE, actions.
With that said, I'd like to throw some numbers out. If you disagree with them, fine. It's extremely hard to find good data, so I'm likely not actually correct. I do hold that these numbers are something like the real numbers.
Average IQ as defined as the expected result the user will achieve on an IQ test for adults, by age:
4- 40
8- 60
13-80
16-100
I came to these numbers through a lot of rounding, math, and varied sources of data, most of them correlated to IQ, but not themselves numbers from IQ tests. What I found interesting, is that percent of average height attainment and average IQ attainment look rather similar when graphed. This goes to a more general declaration that growth/development is rather similar across the board. It also suggests some other possibilities such as the idea that females reach full development sooner than males. Development between races might also be different. IE, effective age between various groups by sex and race should not be equivalent. With that in mind, people with different sex and race should not be forced into the same classes and forced to learn the same materials.
At the age of 16, there's a 50% chance that you'll have at least an average IQ (this is almost by definition.)
At the age of 13, there's a 30% chance that you'll have at least an average IQ
At the age of 8, there's a 15% chance that you'll have at least an average IQ
That said, objectively, something akin to 30% of 8 year olds should be given full rights and 16 year olds should be treated in the same fashion as 18 year olds (there's very little difference between them. Discrimination against 16 year olds in an objective world almost requires discrimination against people older than 40.) In other words, the age of 18 is a very arbitrary number. It should have no moral implications.
With that said, any sort of moral system should give a reason why we treat animals and humans differently. To be clear, fundamentally, we're all just particles. If certain arrangements of atoms are better than other arrangements, they must be better for a reason. Once a reason is given, it will almost certainly either be correlated to IQ or be absurd.
With that said, the idea of "first user" is absurd, for the simple reason that the first users are the elementary particles making up every object in the universe, which by definition control everything. In order to "homestead" humans must steal control from a lower entity and give it to themselves. This is less obvious in terms of rocks or the like, but most advocates of homesteading allow the homesteading of animals, so... If this is morally acceptable, an entity yet higher than a human should be able to seize a human's property and use it for himself. Indeed, any utilitarian system will inevitably rule out property rights, or any other form of absolute right, because rights don't work.
To go further, the very idea of a priori rights violates the basic rules of logic. A priori cannot say ANYTHING. BY DEFINITION. A priori is only allowed to say "If X then Y", anything else and you have reached posteriori logic.
Okay, with that out of the way, we can go back to the treatment of children-
Namely, the difference in rights between children and adults in modern society. As a rule, children are required by law to obey their parent's orders. The parent's orders are limited by law, but they can, and do, send their children to school. In other words, the majority of children in America are threatened into attending school. School generally lasts something like eight hours a day, which will tend to be over half of a student's waking hours. The number increases significantly with homework and studying. In other words, quality of school life is highly correlated to overall quality of life, simply because that's where children spend their time. (I admit this ignores vacations, which might be sufficient to counterbalance homework/etc. but I don't think it even does that much.)
Now, we reach a multitude of moral problems in an instant-
First off, very little exists in terms of systems dedicated to checking whether the child should attend the classes the child is forced into taking. Given the numbers on IQ, something like 5% of 13 year olds should be in college. Since this isn't even close to true, we can assume that vast numbers of children are studying material far below them. Phrased differently, the difference between the IQ of a gifted child and a child in a normal class is something like two common deviations. To make matters worse, schools generally treat normal children as if they were a deviation below where they actually are. In other words, anyone who is three common deviations beyond those who are one common deviation below average is receiving education tailored below their intellect. This is something like 25% of the population which is entirely ignored. Furthermore, people with very low IQ are given materials beyond their ability. That's an additional population of around 10%. So, 35% of the population are ignored by our two tier system of normal+gifted classes.
To be clear, studying material above or below your level is not pleasant. These people are hurt by our actions.
Next off, we have to take into account that not all people think in a manner that can be considered normal. People who are autistic, psychopathic, schizophrenic, etc. add up to a large percentage of the population. In other words, people with extreme repulsions to particular activities that others find normal, exist in large numbers. Most people who display autistic or psychopathic tendencies are neither crippled nor diagnosed. However, just because someone obtains a large income or what have you, does not mean that person lead a good life. As it stands, we have so little understanding of psychology that any attempt to sort children based on their psychology, except ones based on freedom, will fail. We don't even make any real attempts, outside of complete misfits who cannot be forced to fit in no matter how much you threaten and hurt them. Without using freedom, we simply have no access to information that the children have but we don't. An activity could be as unpleasant as a daily whipping, and we wouldn't even notice.
In any case, most people sort of assume that school is a wonderful place that all children love to be in. This isn't the case, at least for large numbers of children. There is a high price that is paid to achieve full schooling of our population, not just by adults who pay taxes but by the children themselves.
Since we're looking at things from a utility standpoint, we must follow up by comparing the benefits.
Most of the time, people take a quick shortcut to full societal collapse. This is silly and not worth talking about. We would, at worst, fall back to society on level with past societies that lacked for any form of education.
However, this does not seem realistic either. First off, without mandatory schooling, some percentage of children would choose of their own will, to attend school.
Second off, it is not impossible to learn math/history/etc at a later age. In fact, it's easier in general. In other words, an 18 year old with no education at all can reach a full education in at most 20 years. IE, by 38. If nobody entered the workforce until the age of 38, (because a phd is needed for ALL jobs...) workforce participation would be reduced by something like 40%.
in other words, the least needed 40% of jobs would be scrapped. The result would be better than spending nothing on healthcare, half as much on transportation and food, and half as much on the military. In other words, the benefits of forcing people to attend school are below that of, fancy cars, fancy food, a military twice the size of any other nation, and seven years of life.
Ending public schooling is not an end of the world scenario unless you use arbitrary vague ideas that can neither be supported nor opposed by evidence. For instance, declaring that people need to learn "work habits" (People are as capable of learning such things late in life as early in life. Rather, 24 year olds are not less capable of learning than 10 year olds, even in regards to learning general habits and the like.)
To go further on just how terrible the treatment of children in America is, we should compare the lack of rights, and the effects thereof that children in America face. The lack of one right often leads to lack of others, so the effects of lacking each right should not be directly added together. IE: The reason why not being allowed to vote hurts children, is that they then are banned from forming contracts.
The most obvious, is that children are not able to obtain jobs, are unable to own property and cannot form contracts. These rights are all completely central to an adult's life. A child is therefore, basically a complete cripple who has to depend on others for anything and everything. Being a child is like being a sickly old man in a home for the elderly. Only, they're totally healthy, so it's insulting and degrading in addition to the troubles that the very old must deal with. Regarding the idea that children might be tricked into contracts that a more mature person would avoid, such contracts should be, and generally are, illegal. Besides law codes that protect people from malicious contracts, tools such as bankruptcy exist. In other words, we're already trying to make a world where contracts can't corner you into bad conditions, so it's really not an issue.
Children are not allowed to vote. This means that the law code will automatically be geared against them. Symptoms that are likely related to this are not just laws that directly discriminate based on age, but things such as extreme government financing through debt and social security obligations, which are layered upon people while they represent an economic resource but are helpless to defend themselves. (Yes, children represent an immediate economic resource. Children will, in general, eventually produce a positive amount of money. Like a paycheck that will be received in a month, a government can cash in on its children by promising to tax them once they pay off their presence. The net positive sum can thus be converted to an immediate economic boon, through debt. IE, children immediately pay for their presence in the nation, so long as outsiders are willing to provide additional debt (IE so long as Malthusian limits don't kick in.)) I'm really not sure why children aren't allowed to vote (except that it might hurt our school system, which I've already stated is evil. As for parents forcing their children to vote poorly, we have secret ballots already, and they deal with the issue just fine.) I really doubt they would ruin our election results, especially considering that likely turnout would be low.
Children are not allowed to drink alcohol. Alcoholic drinks are the main weapon humans have developed in order to escape the experience of life. It is what saved the Soviet Union from existing, and it could help multitudes of children who seek an escape from America. As mentioned before, some people will hate their lives no matter how good things are, that's just how genetics works. As such, people must always have outs, even for life itself. (and no, most people cannot commit suicide even if they want to, so it's not an answer.)
Child sex laws exist. Let me be clear, rape is rape. Rapists should be executed. That said, consensual sex is not rape. In general, this effects children from the age of 13 to 17, mostly 16 to 17 (there are very few cases of consensual sex below that age range, so they can be ignored for now.). Love is important, many people would even go so far as to state it as the most important aspect of life. When people love each-other, they have a natural desire to partake in sex. It happens. It should be allowed. It's not a problem, and it definitely is not rape. In any case, there are couples where one member was convicted of statutory rape, and at the end of the prison term, the two got married and lived normally. Such things do not occur in real rape scenarios.
Of course, child sex laws include not only statutory rape, but child pornography and prostitution.
To examine these laws it's important to consider why adults participate in both fields. The answer is, generally, money. The fields give a lot of it too. This would be most beneficial for children who are desperate for money, namely those who already become prostitutes despite what the law says. Also, drug dealers. Even so, perhaps we should ban prostitution altogether. However I don't think the effects of being a prostitute are so different for a child compared to an adult. At least, if child prostitution were legal it would help drive out child slavery, and would result in much better living conditions for the prostitutes, who would receive vast fortunes and wouldn't be tortured, threatened or infected while they worked. As for child pornography, the standard argument for the laws is just silly. Law enforcement is an effective answer to violence. If some group tries to go about forcing children into sexually provocative acts, they should be, and would be, eliminated through already existing legal codes. Crime rates, worldwide, are low. We don't have to be terrified of criminals, nor do we need to have extra laws that reduce immoral criminal acts below the level reached just through punishing people who directly engage in said acts.
Children are not just animals that can be herded around for our benefit. Even four year olds are vastly more intelligent than dogs, and by eight most children are easily as intelligent as the lower IQ brackets of general society. Treating children poorly is just as bad as treating blacks or women poorly. This is the next civil rights issue. It is not some minor problem. It is the greatest evil existent in modern America. And, like slavery before it, it's currently a well accepted and generally unopposed system. That doesn't mean, and isn't even evidence, that it's not morally reprehensible.
Let me be clear. In any objective morality, a 7 year old who looks, acts and thinks exactly like an average 18 year old should be treated exactly like an average 18 year old. That is the very meaning of objectivity. If you wish to say that someone should be treated differently, you must give a reason why his looks, actions or thoughts should cause that person to be treated differently.
An objective society is, normally, a fair society. IE- in general, objective morality judges people based on their actions, not on looks or even methodology of thought. Only the result of their thought process matters. IE, actions.
With that said, I'd like to throw some numbers out. If you disagree with them, fine. It's extremely hard to find good data, so I'm likely not actually correct. I do hold that these numbers are something like the real numbers.
Average IQ as defined as the expected result the user will achieve on an IQ test for adults, by age:
4- 40
8- 60
13-80
16-100
I came to these numbers through a lot of rounding, math, and varied sources of data, most of them correlated to IQ, but not themselves numbers from IQ tests. What I found interesting, is that percent of average height attainment and average IQ attainment look rather similar when graphed. This goes to a more general declaration that growth/development is rather similar across the board. It also suggests some other possibilities such as the idea that females reach full development sooner than males. Development between races might also be different. IE, effective age between various groups by sex and race should not be equivalent. With that in mind, people with different sex and race should not be forced into the same classes and forced to learn the same materials.
At the age of 16, there's a 50% chance that you'll have at least an average IQ (this is almost by definition.)
At the age of 13, there's a 30% chance that you'll have at least an average IQ
At the age of 8, there's a 15% chance that you'll have at least an average IQ
That said, objectively, something akin to 30% of 8 year olds should be given full rights and 16 year olds should be treated in the same fashion as 18 year olds (there's very little difference between them. Discrimination against 16 year olds in an objective world almost requires discrimination against people older than 40.) In other words, the age of 18 is a very arbitrary number. It should have no moral implications.
With that said, any sort of moral system should give a reason why we treat animals and humans differently. To be clear, fundamentally, we're all just particles. If certain arrangements of atoms are better than other arrangements, they must be better for a reason. Once a reason is given, it will almost certainly either be correlated to IQ or be absurd.
With that said, the idea of "first user" is absurd, for the simple reason that the first users are the elementary particles making up every object in the universe, which by definition control everything. In order to "homestead" humans must steal control from a lower entity and give it to themselves. This is less obvious in terms of rocks or the like, but most advocates of homesteading allow the homesteading of animals, so... If this is morally acceptable, an entity yet higher than a human should be able to seize a human's property and use it for himself. Indeed, any utilitarian system will inevitably rule out property rights, or any other form of absolute right, because rights don't work.
To go further, the very idea of a priori rights violates the basic rules of logic. A priori cannot say ANYTHING. BY DEFINITION. A priori is only allowed to say "If X then Y", anything else and you have reached posteriori logic.
Okay, with that out of the way, we can go back to the treatment of children-
Namely, the difference in rights between children and adults in modern society. As a rule, children are required by law to obey their parent's orders. The parent's orders are limited by law, but they can, and do, send their children to school. In other words, the majority of children in America are threatened into attending school. School generally lasts something like eight hours a day, which will tend to be over half of a student's waking hours. The number increases significantly with homework and studying. In other words, quality of school life is highly correlated to overall quality of life, simply because that's where children spend their time. (I admit this ignores vacations, which might be sufficient to counterbalance homework/etc. but I don't think it even does that much.)
Now, we reach a multitude of moral problems in an instant-
First off, very little exists in terms of systems dedicated to checking whether the child should attend the classes the child is forced into taking. Given the numbers on IQ, something like 5% of 13 year olds should be in college. Since this isn't even close to true, we can assume that vast numbers of children are studying material far below them. Phrased differently, the difference between the IQ of a gifted child and a child in a normal class is something like two common deviations. To make matters worse, schools generally treat normal children as if they were a deviation below where they actually are. In other words, anyone who is three common deviations beyond those who are one common deviation below average is receiving education tailored below their intellect. This is something like 25% of the population which is entirely ignored. Furthermore, people with very low IQ are given materials beyond their ability. That's an additional population of around 10%. So, 35% of the population are ignored by our two tier system of normal+gifted classes.
To be clear, studying material above or below your level is not pleasant. These people are hurt by our actions.
Next off, we have to take into account that not all people think in a manner that can be considered normal. People who are autistic, psychopathic, schizophrenic, etc. add up to a large percentage of the population. In other words, people with extreme repulsions to particular activities that others find normal, exist in large numbers. Most people who display autistic or psychopathic tendencies are neither crippled nor diagnosed. However, just because someone obtains a large income or what have you, does not mean that person lead a good life. As it stands, we have so little understanding of psychology that any attempt to sort children based on their psychology, except ones based on freedom, will fail. We don't even make any real attempts, outside of complete misfits who cannot be forced to fit in no matter how much you threaten and hurt them. Without using freedom, we simply have no access to information that the children have but we don't. An activity could be as unpleasant as a daily whipping, and we wouldn't even notice.
In any case, most people sort of assume that school is a wonderful place that all children love to be in. This isn't the case, at least for large numbers of children. There is a high price that is paid to achieve full schooling of our population, not just by adults who pay taxes but by the children themselves.
Since we're looking at things from a utility standpoint, we must follow up by comparing the benefits.
Most of the time, people take a quick shortcut to full societal collapse. This is silly and not worth talking about. We would, at worst, fall back to society on level with past societies that lacked for any form of education.
However, this does not seem realistic either. First off, without mandatory schooling, some percentage of children would choose of their own will, to attend school.
Second off, it is not impossible to learn math/history/etc at a later age. In fact, it's easier in general. In other words, an 18 year old with no education at all can reach a full education in at most 20 years. IE, by 38. If nobody entered the workforce until the age of 38, (because a phd is needed for ALL jobs...) workforce participation would be reduced by something like 40%.
in other words, the least needed 40% of jobs would be scrapped. The result would be better than spending nothing on healthcare, half as much on transportation and food, and half as much on the military. In other words, the benefits of forcing people to attend school are below that of, fancy cars, fancy food, a military twice the size of any other nation, and seven years of life.
Ending public schooling is not an end of the world scenario unless you use arbitrary vague ideas that can neither be supported nor opposed by evidence. For instance, declaring that people need to learn "work habits" (People are as capable of learning such things late in life as early in life. Rather, 24 year olds are not less capable of learning than 10 year olds, even in regards to learning general habits and the like.)
To go further on just how terrible the treatment of children in America is, we should compare the lack of rights, and the effects thereof that children in America face. The lack of one right often leads to lack of others, so the effects of lacking each right should not be directly added together. IE: The reason why not being allowed to vote hurts children, is that they then are banned from forming contracts.
The most obvious, is that children are not able to obtain jobs, are unable to own property and cannot form contracts. These rights are all completely central to an adult's life. A child is therefore, basically a complete cripple who has to depend on others for anything and everything. Being a child is like being a sickly old man in a home for the elderly. Only, they're totally healthy, so it's insulting and degrading in addition to the troubles that the very old must deal with. Regarding the idea that children might be tricked into contracts that a more mature person would avoid, such contracts should be, and generally are, illegal. Besides law codes that protect people from malicious contracts, tools such as bankruptcy exist. In other words, we're already trying to make a world where contracts can't corner you into bad conditions, so it's really not an issue.
Children are not allowed to vote. This means that the law code will automatically be geared against them. Symptoms that are likely related to this are not just laws that directly discriminate based on age, but things such as extreme government financing through debt and social security obligations, which are layered upon people while they represent an economic resource but are helpless to defend themselves. (Yes, children represent an immediate economic resource. Children will, in general, eventually produce a positive amount of money. Like a paycheck that will be received in a month, a government can cash in on its children by promising to tax them once they pay off their presence. The net positive sum can thus be converted to an immediate economic boon, through debt. IE, children immediately pay for their presence in the nation, so long as outsiders are willing to provide additional debt (IE so long as Malthusian limits don't kick in.)) I'm really not sure why children aren't allowed to vote (except that it might hurt our school system, which I've already stated is evil. As for parents forcing their children to vote poorly, we have secret ballots already, and they deal with the issue just fine.) I really doubt they would ruin our election results, especially considering that likely turnout would be low.
Children are not allowed to drink alcohol. Alcoholic drinks are the main weapon humans have developed in order to escape the experience of life. It is what saved the Soviet Union from existing, and it could help multitudes of children who seek an escape from America. As mentioned before, some people will hate their lives no matter how good things are, that's just how genetics works. As such, people must always have outs, even for life itself. (and no, most people cannot commit suicide even if they want to, so it's not an answer.)
Child sex laws exist. Let me be clear, rape is rape. Rapists should be executed. That said, consensual sex is not rape. In general, this effects children from the age of 13 to 17, mostly 16 to 17 (there are very few cases of consensual sex below that age range, so they can be ignored for now.). Love is important, many people would even go so far as to state it as the most important aspect of life. When people love each-other, they have a natural desire to partake in sex. It happens. It should be allowed. It's not a problem, and it definitely is not rape. In any case, there are couples where one member was convicted of statutory rape, and at the end of the prison term, the two got married and lived normally. Such things do not occur in real rape scenarios.
Of course, child sex laws include not only statutory rape, but child pornography and prostitution.
To examine these laws it's important to consider why adults participate in both fields. The answer is, generally, money. The fields give a lot of it too. This would be most beneficial for children who are desperate for money, namely those who already become prostitutes despite what the law says. Also, drug dealers. Even so, perhaps we should ban prostitution altogether. However I don't think the effects of being a prostitute are so different for a child compared to an adult. At least, if child prostitution were legal it would help drive out child slavery, and would result in much better living conditions for the prostitutes, who would receive vast fortunes and wouldn't be tortured, threatened or infected while they worked. As for child pornography, the standard argument for the laws is just silly. Law enforcement is an effective answer to violence. If some group tries to go about forcing children into sexually provocative acts, they should be, and would be, eliminated through already existing legal codes. Crime rates, worldwide, are low. We don't have to be terrified of criminals, nor do we need to have extra laws that reduce immoral criminal acts below the level reached just through punishing people who directly engage in said acts.
Children are not just animals that can be herded around for our benefit. Even four year olds are vastly more intelligent than dogs, and by eight most children are easily as intelligent as the lower IQ brackets of general society. Treating children poorly is just as bad as treating blacks or women poorly. This is the next civil rights issue. It is not some minor problem. It is the greatest evil existent in modern America. And, like slavery before it, it's currently a well accepted and generally unopposed system. That doesn't mean, and isn't even evidence, that it's not morally reprehensible.
